We've Reached Peak Curation In Music. Can Collisions Save Us From Ourselves?

We have now reached, what I believe to be peak curation. That is, there is little-to-no value at this point from much of the "curation" that we are bombarded with. What's lacking, and what we need more of are collisions: unexpected encounters with people, ideas and art that are random. It is only via these types of "collision" interactions when magic takes place.

By any objective measure, the past 10 years or so of the Internet can be defined as the era of "curation." The Web2.0 era (I know, that's a term you haven't heard in a while), began in earnest with communities of interests organized around a taxonomy of tags, and made manifest via sites like Delicious (née del.icio.us) and flickr, which helped introduce the trend of namng stes wth strategiclly omtted vowls.

Platforms of all stripes (Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) constructed architectures of curation designed to accelerate network-effect growth via essentially allowing users to carefully cultivate their lists of friends and followers in ways that increase the likelihood of delightful dopamine hits from positive feedback; rather than the crushing existential dread of silence or...gasp...disagreement.

Of course, retailers - for a ton of obvious reasons - have made curation their core competency. As such, curation has become commoditized. As is wont to happen to commoditized offerings, valuations decline. To wit, the negative economic consequences of this "peak curation" state is summed up succinctly via coverage of the sale of one über curator: "One Kings Lane sold for less than $30 million after being valued at $900 million."

Even still, retailers continue "curating" everything (no, really, everything). For every Birchbox that seems to have gained some degree of traction by providing a specific set of "hand selected" goods, there are literally hundreds of startups attempting to attain product/market "fit" in some very specific verticals.

To wit, the very accurately named site, Monthly Subscription Box List, appears to keep track of all the new "curated" service offerings. Some that jumped out at me:

Babbling With Babies: Babbling With Babies is a subscription based series focusing on strategies for parents to facilitate their baby’s early speech and language skills.

The H2Bar Box: The How to be a Redhead (H2BAR) Box is a monthly subscription box for redheads. The company’s goal is to empower every redhead to feel confident, look amazing and rock their beauty.

GeekDients: GeekDients ships ingredient kits to your front door to make authentic fantasy and geek recipes from every story and creature!

With respect to music, I have written previously about why music services are wasting their time recommending new music. The trajectory of identifying/tracking/utilizing "music genomes" in a way that super-services listeners has led to services "curating" music in a manner that does indeed give listeners precisely what they want: what they already know.

Moore's law accelerates all of this. Technology gets better at observing our habits and providing more exact curation, while, at the same time, filtering out that which might be distasteful.

We as users/customers aid and abet. Absent social validation from our "friends" in our networks, we simply unfollow/block them, and continue to "curate" our streams. The algorithms pick up on this, and suggest other people, products and music that aligns with our affirmative actions.

Over time, we curate a world so perfectly in harmony with our points of view that no rough-edged, sharp-elbowed, dissonance is allowed. Everything is in its right place, and the world is properly aligned on its axis.

Except, it's killing us:

It's making us dumb.

It's making us uninteresting.

It's making us uninformed.

It's reducing empathy.

It's reducing curiosity.

It's reducing "discourse" to a binary state of either total agreement or violent disagreement.

It's reducing the opportunity for collisions.

Collisions - unexpected encounters with people, ideas or art that are random, rather than artfully curated - are often the domain where magic takes place.

In 1973, long before the Internet, the sociologist Mark Granovetter published his paper, "The Strength of Weak Ties," in which he argued that it is through these moments of connection with people outside our immediate social circle (our strong ties), that growth into new sectors is facilitated. This idea was amplified to great effect by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point.

However, the Internet seems intent on vastly reducing/eliminating any "weak tie" type of interactivity.

The current election cycle brings this into stark relief. The only time a viewpoint in opposition to your own is likely to appear in your Facebook feed, for instance, is if something you post is shared by one of your "friends," and then one of their friends makes a comment that references you. This is pretty much the definition of a "weak tie" event - a connective node between two disparate social circles - and it's increasingly rare.

Instead, we simply preach to the choir, knowing all too well - as the memes remind us - that the likelihood of actually causing someone to reconsider their POV (let alone changed their mind) based on something we post is non-existent.

And so, the unintended consequence of utilizing algorithms and human intervention to accelerate network effects and platform growth has taken us from a place of expanding our subject knowledge via incremental novelty - sourced from those with the same psychographic disposition as ourselves - to where we are now: "peak curation."

Peak curation means that there is no longer incremental value from being served "Likes" or "Shares" or "Recommendations" from those within our social circles, because we likely already had the information or were served it from the same sources from which are friends are now sharing.

What's now more than ever needed in this era of Peak Curation are collisions. These jarring moments from disparate points of view - not presented or dismissed as polemics - are increasingly important; not simply for being welcome distractions from the nominal hum of worthless "curation," but as necessary injections of un-curated information to possibly save us from the hobgoblin of the rigidly consistent mind...and ourselves.

I am an Associate Professor of Music Business/Management at Berklee College of Music and Brown University, and Co-Founder of Music Audience Exchange. Via GHS, my strategic consulting and management firm, I have worked with companies and individuals such as: CVS/pharmacy, Int...